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THE LORD OF THE LOTUS PETALS by Raquel Taylor
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Rated "PG13" by the Author.
Cowboy Kung-fu, Zombie Horror.
The Lord of the Lotus Petals
1872, mining town of Purgatory
near Santa Fe, California
WANTED
FOR MURDER
BRUCE LEI WANG
$10,000 ALIVE!
$5,000 DEAD
Notify CHINESE LEGATION
In San Francisco
SUBJECT IS UNARMED BUT EXTREMELY
DANGEROUS
His Hands And Feet Must Be Considered
Deadly Weapons
CHECK FOREARMS FOR ABOVE TATTOOS
Ames Butler, leader of the infamous Butler Gang, stared at the wanted poster whimsically. Ten thousand dollars was enough money to really make a man’s dreams come true . Why the tattered poster was glued to the rotting log walls of the abandoned mineshaft, he could not fathom. Ames coughed deeply and wetly. He spat blood on the ground dry ground. He got a good gob of the stuff on his dusty boots and looked at them in disgust. He was hurt bad. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him so. He was dying. The ground leapt up to meet him, face to face. He put his arms out, seeking balance, and managed to stop himself from falling.
“You all right, pap?” Lee Ray asked cautiously.
Ames heard the fear in the boy’s voice and wondered what Lee Ray was going to do without him. The posse wasn’t far behind and simple fact was, Ames wasn’t long for the world.
“Hell no,” Ames told his youngest and only remaining son, “I am definitely not all right, boy.”
Ames kept looking at the wanted poster. He leaned into the rotted wood of the mineshaft opening to keep himself from falling. The wanted man was a bald—very odd looking--Chinaman. The oddest thing about the picture was that someone had taken the time and effort to color the Chinaman’s eyes a stunning blue. The aforementioned tattoos fascinated him and he couldn’t stop staring at them as his world came in and out of focus. The first was a dragon. The second was a feral looking tiger.
If we had hunted down the mysterious, blue-eyed Chinaman instead of taking the bank, Ames thought darkly, I wouldn’t be dying and a posse wouldn’t be hunting down the only son I have left in the world. And there’d be more money to boot.
The Butler Gang had only gotten seven thousand out of the bank vaults. Seven thousand dollars before the shooting began. Eight outlaws had been reduced to four before the butler Gang could even get out of town.
Ames coughed up blood again and a thick gout of the stuff spattered on the wanted poster, obliterating the Chinaman’s face. Ames moved into the darkness of the mineshaft, traveling deep into its pitch-black darkness. “Rufus,” he said to the man who brought up the rear of their small pack, “you stay here and watch for the posse. You see their dust and you report to me.”
“You’re gonna be dead in a minute, old man,” Rufus Vega said with a sneer. “I’ll come and find Lee Ray. He’s an idiot. But he’s the leader of this idiot band now that you’re so close to departin’ this here earthly plane. I’m gonna sincerely miss you.”
Ames chuckled low and deep in his throat, stirring the blood that was pooling there. He had always hated Vega. The half-breed Spaniard was low and sneaky as a biscuit eating dog. But that hatred came with a grudging respect. Vega would either look after Lee Ray or kill him. One or the other and it would be done; there wouldn’t be a lot of bullshit in between.
Ames stumbled in the darkness and almost fell. He felt the hands of the big albino Turk steady him and appreciated the kindness. “Where we goin’, Butler?” the Turk asked, his water blue eyes jiggling maniacally in his head—the sight made even more strange and unnatural by the benefit of the lantern the Turk was carrying. “I don’t like all this…darkness. Why would you come to such a dark place to die? A man should be in t he light when he dies so that those that reside in the Heaven’s can see him and know for certain that he is ready to join them.”
“I found something once,” Ames said softly. “I was here before. Deep down at the bottom of this mine is something…something…wonderful. It’s made of pure gold and it sparkles like it fell straight from Heaven. I don’t know what’s…what’s inside…I was too chicken shit to look back then. But now that I’m dyin’…I want to know…I want to know what it is…”
“Pap…Pap, the posse,” Lee Ray said, and Ames was ashamed of the fear in the young man’s voice. Why wasn’t Lee Ray more like his brothers? the old man lamented deep inside. Billy and Carl Butler hadn’t been scared of anything, least of all a little posse composed of hastily gathered wanna-be law boys.
“Lee Ray,” Ames said tiredly. He was leaning heavily on the Turk now and his world had gone utterly black along the fringes of his vision—blacker than the darkness of the mine, blacker than, he imagined, Hell itself. “You have no idea what I’m giving you. And since I don’t really understand it myself, I won’t even bother trying to explain. Let me say this…this here mine used to be the biggest in California. Its owner, one G. Franklin Park, hired me to kill his wife, a pretty little Mexican whore named Maria. Far as I could tell before I took the job, the beauty, brought out of the bordellos by her rich husband, had screwed one of his businesses associated or some such nonsense. He wanted her dead. He wanted her buried deep within the mine she’d married him for.”
Ames paused, remembering the pretty woman. She’d had inky black hair like spun silk, and slanted eyes that were exotic and the color of rich chocolate. Her full and inviting lips had swollen quickly from the brute force of his savage kisses. He hadn’t even waited till they got in the mine to take her once he’d had her in his possession. He clothes had ripped like wet rice paper under the brutality of his assault. He remembered choking her until her golden brown skin turned blue, but leaving her just enough breath to live as he force himself in between her honeyed thighs. And that was only the first time. He’d savaged her repeatedly as dawn came to the little valley below the mine. He’d done things to her he’d never dared to do to any other woman—things that he had replayed in his memory a hundred thousand times afterward. She had been a fine piece of ass, unrivaled by any other in his experience and that included the whey milk-sow that had produced his sons.
“I drug her out here,” he continued, unable to stop the grin that was creeping onto his face with the memories, “took everything I wanted from her and tossed her in an unexplored corner of the mineshaft. I thought the fall would kill her. It didn’t. She was down there screaming. I dropped a lantern in the hole so I could put a bullet in her. I saw her at the bottom of the shaft, naked and bleeding. The thing was right next to her. It shined pretty in the lantern light—a gold barrel, that’s what I think it was—a barrel made entirely of gold with little winking red and amber lights. I took a few shots at the bitch, but apparently, there are tunnels down there in the dark. She scurried into one of em. I wasn’t about to go down there and get her. I told Parks she was dead and buried and left town. Couple of months later I heard reports of screaming and snarling in the mind, demented laughter. The miner’s thought it was haunted. They got out. Parks closed the mine and lit outta town soon after.”
“So there’s still gold in this mine?” Lee Ray asked.
“Yep,” Ames said blood-wetly. “Parks won’t mine the damn thing himself and he won’t sell. There have been a few pirates over the years. Miners who excavate illegally, but after a few of ‘em disappeared, the mine was just wholly abandoned.”
“Disappeared?” the Turk whispered, his jittery eyes as wide a dinner plates in the amber lit darkness. “Why would you bring us to a place where people disappear Butler? There are things in darkness such as this that are better left unfound, untouched. Gold or no gold, I want no part of this.”
“Can you think of a better place to hide from that hangin’ posse?” Ames growled. “Cause they’ll string your silly ass up right where the Heaven’s can see ya’. I can guarantee you that!”
The Turk fell silent as Ames words echoed through the mine, taking on the pitch and tone of a thousand angry ghosts. The word ‘hang’ echoed back at least a dozen times, reaching an eerie fevered pitch. “No jury for us,” Ames reminded the albino. “No judge. Just the vultures and the fucking crows.”
The dying man grinned and there was madness sparkling in his eyes as he did so. Truth was, he had brought the gang to the mine for purely selfish reasons. His own desire and the knowledge of his own imminent death had caused a craving in him and it was a craving that he was helpless to deny. He had to see her again—even if what he saw was only her moldering, yellowed bones. She was the love of his life, the unrivaled mold by which all other women fell short. He wanted to fall down dead on her violated, mummified corpse, his head facing her skull, his eyes trained on the empty sockets that had once been those incredible chocolate eyes so filled with pain and fear, humiliation and…rage.
It was as simple as that. But he wouldn’t bother explaining that to the few remaining members of the gang. They wouldn’t understand. After all, this journey would benefit them too. There was the golden barrel to think of. The thing had to be worth enough gold to make them very, very rich men forever. Plus, there were hiding places within the mine that no posse would ever find. He thought of the natural catacombs where the girl had hidden from him.
“Don’t be a pussy all your life, Turk,” Ames said, motioning for them to turn in the darkness. They were deep in the mine now, so deep that the amber light from the lantern did little to penetrate the gulfing shadows around them. “Leave your superstitious bullshit in that shit-hole country you hail from. Here, give me the lantern.”
He took the light and shone it in one corner. There was a hole there—a broken off, ragged oval of a thing. It was just big enough for a man to get through and go down. Someone had strung a moldy rope ladder over the side of it and the ladder descended into the fathomless darkness below. “Almost there,” Ames whispered to the ghost of the girl he had raped and murdered over twenty years ago.
“Vega will never find us if we go down there,” Lee Ray whispered.
“Fuck Vega,” Ames spat and red spittle flew from his lips with the fury of his words. “He’ll kill you because you’re a dumb-shit, boy. If you had an ounce of sense, he’d probably let you live. But you don’t, so you’re better off without him.”
“I ain’t goin’ in that fucking hole,” the Turk said as Ames knelt and pushed the lantern arms length down its darkness.
“Don’t know where this ladder came from,” Ames said, ignoring the albino’s words. The rope was practically green with dried mold. “Someone else has been down here. Maybe they found it. Maybe they found…her.”
His hands were trembling at the horror of the thought. He couldn’t loose her now that he was so close. He couldn’t die without wrapping her in his arms again. The lantern fell from his grasp and tumbled into the hole. In its twisting amber light he saw the cavern below exposed for the barest second before the lantern exploded on the ground below. He saw the openings to the dozens of caverns connected to the main one below him.
A gust of wind stirred from below and the air from the hole hit him full in the face. It smelled decidedly rotten. It made him uncomfortable, that grotesque cloying, caused a wave of fear to ride up in him that was so deep and real it was choking. He reared back from the hole, gagging.
And then he spied the lights deep below, it wasn’t where it once was, but farther back, deeper in the recesses of the chamber. It winked amber and red in the fathomless nothingness.
Whoever had come had not taken the gold, Ames thought, and if they hadn’t taken the gold then Maria was still down there. What fool would take a corpse when there was gold to be had? They had moved his precious barrel, but it was still there waiting for him. And he had no doubt, that somewhere below; his private whore was waiting with it.
He leaned over and dropped his legs down into the hole, hoping that the rotten rope would support his weight. The Turk grabbed him; the man’s face a tortured too-white nightmare in the treacherous blackness.
“No, Butler,” the albino began.
Ames shook the other man’s hands off. In doing that, he upset his balance on the ladder and the rope beneath his feet broke, sending him tumbling headlong into darkness.
The breath leapt out of his body for a second and the world went totally completely black. He was aware, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, and the pain in his chest threatened to consume him in an agony that reached every particle and cell in his being.
Very softly and from very far away Ames heard Vega’s voice. “They’re coming! Posse’s coming! Shit! They’re headed directly for us!”
“Pap!” he heard Lee Ray yell, “Pap, are you all right?”
Stupid inbred bastard, Ames thought, that’s what I get for fucking, marrying and breeding with my first cousin. It’s a wonder the other two hadn’t been shit retarded to match.
“Get your dumb ass down here, Lee Ray,” Ames growled the moment that he could breathe. The fall had ripped the bullet wound open. He could feel blood spreading onto his chest and soaking his shirtfront. It was pooling up under his back. He couldn’t move. Lee Ray would have to move him, position him exactly so that he was lying with is ladylove. But first Lee Ray would have to find the bitch. He had to do it quickly too. There was a rushing in Ames brain. It was low at first but it was getting progressively louder. It sounded like the wind during a hurricane. He wondered if it was the sound of his unsatisfied soul leaving the fleshy cage of his body.
“I’m comin’, Pap,” Lee Ray yelled.
The idiot was halfway down the ladder when he plummeted. Ames wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
“Damn, but that hurt,” Lee Ray said.
Ames couldn’t see him in the inky darkness but he could hear the boy clamoring to his feet. He could hear other things too. A low hiss filled the darkness and then a soft, but hungry, moan.
“Pap?” Lee Ray said, softly. “There’s someone down here with us.”
Ames forced his body to move, to sit up. The pain was phenomenal, but there was a sudden desperation in him that killed it. “Get your ass back on that ladder, Lee Ray,” he said.
“I-I can’t,” Lee Ray whined. “There was only half a ladder to begin with.”
“Shit!” Ames said. “Be quiet boy, be real fuckin’ quiet.”
He could hear footfalls, several of them. They seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, taking deep shuffling steps.
Step…lurch…
“Pap?” Lee Ray said softly. There were tears in his voice.
Another moan filled the room, it echoed, almost savage in its intensity. Then Lee Ray did begin to cry. Ames could hear him scuffling against the wall upon which the ladder hung, as if the boy were trying to climb the wall itself to reach the rope. Ames thought about how young Lee Ray was, barely eighteen, and for the first time since the boy had been in the world, he didn’t feel ashamed of him for showing weakness.
“I found a lantern!” the Turk yelled, his voice gargantuan and terrified in the stillness. “I ain’t comin’ down there with you stupid fucks, but I guess I can provide some light for ya. You still alive, Butler Senior? You find your stupid fool’s gold?”
At the moment, Ames thought, his blood ice cold in his veins. Something cold brushed against his skin, something ice cold. His hair stood on end at the bizarre gentleness of the touch. Fingers brushed across the skin at the back of his neck. He felt the rake of claws along with too soft, too cold flesh. Ames pissed himself. That scent mingled with the heavy smell of rotten meat and fresh blood.
The light, Ames wanted to scream as the lantern passed down through the hole on a bit of old rope. The light…don’t…
He didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to know what was touching him so cold, so intimately in the darkness. It wasn’t her. He knew that much. It couldn’t be.
He smelled the fettered stench of some thing’s cold breath, inches from his face. The light burst into his vision and his eyes snapped shut against the painful assault of its golden glow.
“Allah! Have! Mercy!” the Turk screamed, his voice high pitched and warbling like a woman’s.
There were dozens of them, and his voice joined the symphony of the Turks horrified warbling. Dead things. Rotten things. Blue-gray, half-devoured monsters.
They were coming out of the caverns, their blind white eyes clapped on the fresh meat trembling within their midst. Their mouths opened in obvious screaming savage hunger, their jaws snapping rhythmically as if they were already eating.
Ames turned his eyes away from the thing in front of him, the thing that held its mouth kissing distance from his. He watched his son run stumble in the direction of the golden barrel, a wave of the monstrosities surging greedily behind him. The word on the barrel flashed in brilliant orange. Even though Ames couldn’t understand the word or the numbers that accompanied it—he just couldn’t wrap his mind around the implication—he understood suddenly that the barrel that he’d thought about for twenty years was dangerous. Dangerous in a way that he would never even hope to understand even though it was killing him.
The word on the barrel sang a death song in his mind: TOXIC. The number’s sung the hook: 2024.
“Containment cylinder 19471659 located,” a soft female voice sang into the cavern. “Time-Retrieval Mandatory. Locating available Bounty Hunter. Bounty Hunter located. Reece Wesley. Sending location of containment cylinder now. Warning. Cylinder has been breeched. Infected…43…44…”
Lee Ray fell over the barrel and the lights on the thing stopped blinking amber and yellow and began to blink a desperate orange. The wave of monsters piled onto the boy. His screams were short, gurgled and horrible. The dead things ate and bathed in his blood and gore.
Ames turned back to the thing in front of him. It was Maria. Her white eyes stared into his. Decay had not touched her except to change the color of her skin to a dull blue-gray. Her lips were still full and when she leaned in to kiss him he did not resist. The taste of her dead flesh was foul.
She bit into his jawbone, cracking it with her powerful teeth. Ames screamed and thrashed and writhed in pain as he felt other hands on him, roaming his body, tearing his stomach open. Some of the monsters buried their faces in the exposed hollow of his belly and began to devour the long ropes of entrails within.
He heard a gunshot from up above. It seemed to come from a million light-years away, as did Vega’s dead knell. The posse’s here, he thought, and that struck him as funny. He watched for as long as he could as she knelt between his legs and bit through the touch material of his pants to get to the soft flesh beneath.
Bitch, he thought as she grinned at him and one of his balls dangled from her greedy churning jaws. Whore…
“Infected,” the soft voice from the cylinder, said, “45.”
*
The boy stood at the entrance of the cave. He knew that he would have to go in. He knew that passing this test was expected of him. Still, he hesitated; using every Shaolin teaching he had learned thus far to lessen the fear that rode in his chest. His child’s imagination, even trained as it was by the priest of Shaolin, conjured up a thousand fanged and clawed nightmares waiting within the inky blackness. Heart beating a frantic tom-tom in his chest, the boy stared into the cavern and tried to discern the shapes of the rocks and the entrances to the branching caverns within. How would he find the lotus blossom? How could he please his Master when the fear in him was so great that it seem alive? He could almost hear it raving beside him, warning him of things that dwelled in shadows.
The blind priest waited patiently beside him.
“Master,” the boy asked finally, “why do men fear darkness?”
The old man chuckled and turned his white eyes toward his pupil. “It is not the darkness we fear, Bumble Bee, but the unknown. You must bring me the white Lotus Blossom from with the cave. You will know the blossom when you find it.”
“How, Master?” the boy asked. “I can not see within the cavern. The darkness is almost complete. How will I know the blossom?”
The blind man smiled softly. “You will know it, Bumble Bee. When you loose the benefit of one of your senses, use the others to replace it. If you cannot see, hear. If you cannot hear, smell. If you cannot smell, touch. Such a balance exists in life to allow an old man like me to continue. I cannot see but that does not cripple me because all of my other senses work to compensate. Close your eyes, Bumble Bee, and find the Lotus Blossom.”
The boy hesitated for only a moment more before drawing his lids down over his eyes, shutting out the sunlight and the glorious white light of day. He counted to three and then moved into the cavern, all his other senses alert and working overtime.
“Looked for, I cannot be seen,” he said softly to himself, “Listened for, I cannot be heard. Touched, I cannot be felt. There is nothing for Bruce Lei Wang to fear in this darkness.”
Moments after he stepped into the cavern he caught the faint familiar scent of Lotus Blossom drifting in the stale wind. He smiled and followed the scent deep into the darkness of the cave; confident that he would find it and that his Master’s wisdom would guide him.
The man, Bruce Lei Wang, did not like the mineshaft. It smelled wrong to him somehow, rotten. He was, however, not in a position to consider his likes and dislikes. He had been captured that morning and a rope thrown around his neck. He had been dragged behind a horse like an animal for over twenty miles, his most overwhelming concern not to fall to the ground and have his neck broken by the racing animal. The posse, truthfully, had not been concerned with him, already hunting more dangerous prey. His capture had been a mishap, a matter of unfortunate timing. He had wanted water and had chosen the wrong time to leave his comfortable camp and go and get it. The posse had been at the watering hole. Lieutenant Danvers had recognized him from the wanted posters. And he had been dragged twenty miles to the mine in pursuit of the Butler Gang.
“Roc-Dirty, that damn barefoot Chinaman’s slippery,” the Captain said. He tilted his hat on his head and spit a brown glob of tobacco to the ground. “The Chinese delegates that are looking for him say he can fucking disappear. Some kinda shaman or monk or witch doctor or some ridiculous primitive bullshit. You don’t let him out of your sight till this is done and there’s a hefty reward in it for you, ya hear?”
The man called Roc-Dirty grinned at Wang with a mouthful of broken yellow teeth. He pulled the rope he held in his filthy hands and jerked Wang forward by the neck. Wang would not allow himself to stumble, as the man would have liked. He moved gracefully to stand beside his captor. His eyes were on the mine and the terrible stench that oozed from it like a sickness, like a plague.
“Captain,” he said softly, “I do not think we should go in there. It is a…” he searched for the word, “…a dead place.”
It was a fitting word. It didn’t exactly make sense to him—as a Shaolin Priest he knew that even a graveyard was not a dead place. The entire world was life and life was a thing to be respected. Even in death there was life, a rebirth. That was the natural order of things. But Wang didn’t sense anything natural about the mine. The death inside it was total, all encompassing and gave birth to nothing save more death. He looked into its dark cavernous mouth and shuddered outwardly.
“The man you killed was running out of the mine,” Wang continued, “into the arms of people that he knew would kill him. You should heed the warning he gave with his life.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Roc-Dirty said and elbowed Wang in the stomach. This time Wang could not keep up the pretense of being unaffected by the man’s cruelty. He bowled over, breath rushing out of him in a cold rush. His weak legs, sore from keeping up with the posse, threatened to buckle.
Two men came forward dragging the body of Rufus Vega. The dead man had been shot in the head, a dark meaty hole right between his eyebrows. Red streaked bits of white bone from his shattered skull winked up into the rapidly descending sunlight.
“Don’t make sense, Captain,” one of the men said, dropping the body at Danvers’s feet. “He came right at us.”
Danvers shrugged. “One less dirty outlaw. Don’t much matter how we got him. There’s three more of em in the mine and ten of us to root em out. Seems like fair odds to me, boys. Let’s do this and get home before our dinner’s cool.”
The men laughed, more than ready to kill in the name of the law. Wang shook his head, sad for them. It wasn’t just what he sense about the mine that unnerved him. It was the men’s notion that they had the right to deal out justice against other men. Man’s justice was rarely…just…in his opinion. And he didn’t hold himself above other men in that judgment. He had killed a man once in China. He knew well the rage that inspired those seeking justice to kill. He knew well that the satisfaction of a warranted murder was tempered with an eternal black mark on the soul.
The sound of gunshots sounded from deep within the mine. There was franticness to the echoing sounds, terrible desperation. Wang listened as the shooting tapered off, the gun was reloaded and the shooting started again.
The mangy group of men that comprised the posse looked at the gulfing mouth of the mine’s entrance nervously. Men were walking amongst the horses gathering light sources, there was a single lantern. Two men began tearing large chunks of rotted wood from the frame of the mine’s entrance. They wrapped strips of cloth around the ends of the wood, poured lantern oil on the cloth and set it on fire, creating several torches.
“What do you thinks goin’ on in there, Captain?” a large man with a red beard and bright green eyes asked. There was something about the man that made Wang stare at him hard in the dim glow of the descending sunlight. The flesh around the edges of his face seemed… baggy. The skin about his eyes didn’t quite seem to fit in his sagging face. His bulky body, wrapped in the filthy garb that bespoke of long days on the prairie was heaped about his large frame.
“Don’t know, stranger,” Danvers said. He took his revolver out of the holster and checked the chambers. “Don’t much matter, do it? If they kill each other or we kill em, we still collect the same reward.”
“I suppose you’re right,” the stranger said, licking his lips fretfully. “ I think the concerns of your prisoner may have some foundation, however. This situation may be more than this small group of men is able to handle--”
“What’s your name, stranger?” Danvers asked with narrowed eyes. “When we picked you up in the Santa Fe yesterday, I didn’t have a chance to get your name. Share that little bit of information with me now, would ya’?”
“Havisham…Bill Havisham, sir.”
“Well, Bill…did you sign on with my posse, or did I sign on with yours?”
“Sir, I—we could wait out here. They would have to come out eventually…or die in there.”
“Right,” Danvers said dismissively and the rest of the group of men snickered. Danvers moved to the mouth of the mine. “These men killed seven people taking that bank. One of ‘em was a kid no more than ten years old. Ran him over like horse shit breakin’ outta town. Any of you cowards that want to stay out here with Bill and wait for the real men to do what needs doin’, can consider yourself cut out of the reward money. Bill, the Chinaman’s coming with me, so I suspect you’ll be out here alone. But I might be wrong; there may be more chicken shits. I’m callin’ to the men amongst you, let’s get this over with.”
Danvers grabbed the lantern and disappeared into the mine. Roc-Dirty jerked on the rope that held Wang by the throat and scrambled after the Captain. Wang followed the other man reluctantly up the slim hill that led to the mine’s entrance. As he passed the bulky figure that was Bill Havisham, their eyes locked. Wang saw horror in the other man’s gaze, pure unadulterated terror and then he was dragged into the shadows.
He closed his eyes against the dim glow of the torchlight and listened to the rhythm of his own heartbeat in order to center himself. He heard the echo of the footfalls of the men in his self-darkened world. He heard other things as well, different footfalls, from very far away—shuffling lurching steps devoid of cadence. And the low terrified breathing of someone hiding in the dark. The low spasmodic pulling of the trigger on an empty gun, the desperate, futile click, click, clicking dancing off the mine walls.
With an almost imperceptible twist of his head and neck Wang was free of the rope that connected him to his captor. Without bothering to open his eyes, he caught the falling rope deftly, keeping it tense so that Roc-Dirty would not be aware of the fact that his prisoner was free until Wang had disappeared into the shadows at the edges of the light.
Someone was whimpering, from deep within the mineshaft. The echo rode the stale wind to Wang’s well-trained ears. It was not a whimper of sadness…but of unspeakable horror that had robbed the mind of sanity. There were other sounds too, low moaning. They were hungry sounds and they made the hair on the back of Wang’s neck stand on end. He had never heard anything like them…anything so desperate and with such appalling… need.
“Its damn fuckin’ dark in this shithole,” Captain Danvers growled.
The men around the captain were silent, checking every corner, every shadow for signs of the men they hunted. No one was paying any attention to Wang. He and his ten thousand dollar reward had been forgotten as soon as the darkness had closed in around the men and became the near living entity that cocooned them.
He let the rope fall and slid into the shadows, becoming little more than a shadow himself. He was desperate to be away from this dead and unnatural place. He felt claustrophobic, his lungs filled with the stink of dead things. These men, he had no doubt, were walking into something truly hideous. They would die. As much as that saddened Wang, he knew that he was not willing to die with them, just as he knew that they would never listen to any warning he gave. It was their ignorance that would kill them, not his abandonment. They had no sense of the natural order of things. What was obvious to Wang—the first thing being that wanted men did not run into the waiting arms of a hanging posse—was not obvious to them. They were blind to nature and even blinder of human nature.
He found Havisham in the shadows, the big man standing just outside of the reach of the light. The posse and their captain went on and the golden glow of their illuminated forms slid further into the darkness ahead. Wang opened his eyes to the rotted mineshft, his gaze turning to the waning sunlight at the mine’s entrance as Havisham regarded him in the dark.
“You are a Shaolin priest,” Havisham whispered conspiratorially.
“I am Wang,” Wang whispered back, “I am simply a man.”
“But you will become a god,” Havisham said, softly. “The Lord of the Lotus Petals…Savior of the Living World.”
Wang frowned, his mind whirling with the strange man’s words. There was such conviction in Havisham’s tone that the ridiculousness of the words dimmed in comparison to Wang’s need to comprehend what was said.
“I do not understand--”
Havisham laughed. “No, I did not imagine that you would. I did not dare to hope that I would even see you, let alone talk with you like this. However, it cannot be helped. I need your assistance…Master. I am beginning to doubt myself. I am overcome with fear and…and shame. If you do not aid me, everything will die. We do not have much time but as proof of my sincerity and desperation, I will show my true self to you. This too is against the regulations. But the regulations won’t matter if this situation is not contained.”
Wang watched the light begin to glow. He saw that Havisham was holding a small blue orb in his meaty hand. The light from the orb illuminated the black space between them and Wang found stared into Havisham’s sagging face. The other man pulled at his clothes. Along with the clothing, the man was peeling off thick layers of skin. The skin hit the floor with a jellied ‘plop’. The underside of the skin blinked with hundreds of tiny lights and a wicked current ran zigzag from one light to the other. Wang backed away from Havisham as the man peeled away more and more of his flesh, digging his fingers into the flesh of his cheeks and pulling that skin away like wet rice paper.
“Abomination,” Wang hissed, even though he could sense nothing monstrous about the thing that stood before him. His eyes tried to take in everything at one and his breath came out of him in a low gasp of utter disbelief when the last of the skin about the face and torso fell to the floor. Large, perfect, breasts with rosy pink nipples winked at him from where a man’s chest had been. A tiny waist with a rose dot navel was exposed. That tiny rose led to a thatch of silken black hair that lay between the legs of the most stunning woman Wang had ever seen.
The woman that stepped free of Havisham’s skin was anything but monstrous. Her lustrous black hair hung over her shoulders and down her waist. Her eyes were the same green that they had been when she had worn the impossible all-over body mask. Her full lips pulled back from perfect white teeth. Wang’s gaze slid over the impossible vision before him, taking in the small tattoos of a dragon on her right cheek the tiger on the left.
She knelt at his feet, her head bowed submissively. “I am First Reserve Hunter Reece Wesly. I come from the year 2024. In my time, Master…in our time, most of the world is dead. There was no explanation for the plague that hit in 2020 and killed most of humanity. The dead rose. They walked. They fed on us. We have secured a city and renamed it Shelter and within that city we are free of the ravenous dead. We travel through time with the ease of a child learning to toddle. In time is where we found you. You taught us how to fight without guns and ammunition…how to combat the dead with our hands and our hearts save ourselves the fallacies of man-made guns and ammunition. You taught us how to be looked for without being seen, listened for without being heard, touched without being felt.”
She looked up at him through a sheen of crystalline tears. Her lips trembled. “We have mastered many technologies within Shelter, but nothing that will make the dead stay dead. There are those that would see the past eaten by the dead so great is the envy of it and those who really got a chance to live. Kai Mordu was one of those people. He sought to bring our nightmare to your time in the hope that he could erase his own existence.”
“This man brought a plague?” Wang asked, his mind trying desperately to comprehend. He sensed a need to hurry, to be swift and sure in his decisions, that need was tempered by the impossibility of the beautiful woman kneeling before him, a woman born whole from the skin of man.
“He is dead!” Reese spat. “I am ashamed to say that I killed another human being with my bare hands! I thrust my finger into his eyes. I pierced his brain in the matter that you taught us to kill the zombies. It seemed fitting. He was a dead thing, just a putrid as any zombie where his soul should have been.”
She got to her feet and began tearing through the heaped up piles of flesh until she found a small packet filled with clothing. The suit she wore was skintight. It covered her entire body including her feet and fingers. She drew the black cloth over her head—only her face was visible to him.
“Master, we do not have much time,” she said. “Please…put this on. The material is like steel. It will protect you from their bite.”
“Bite?” Wang said, taking the package that she offered him. It was more of the strange black garb.
“It is how the dead pass on infection,” Reese said. “It is strange…this teaching you the things that you taught to me. It makes me uncomfortable to talk to me Master so.”
“I-I am going,” Wang said softly, handing her back the packet of cloth. “I must find my brother, Danny Wang. I do not understand you, Reese Wesley. I see you before me and, therefore, I understand that you are real. Yet, this is…too much.”
“Your brother will die, along with the rest of the world, if you do not help me now, Master. Most of the Hunters of Shelter were dispatched to an aid call for a band of Survivors in New York City. There is no one besides me to collect this bounty and I’m telling you that I cannot do it alone. I-I am afraid.”
Wang stared at her, sensing the sincerity of her insane words. She was shaking and the crystalline glaze in her eyes had turned to real tears that fell across her pale cheeks. There was a part of him that wanted to comfort her; he could see the shadows of horror dancing in her gaze, a horror so old and so familiar that she had come to live with it as if it were incestuous kin.
“I can show you,” she said compellingly, passing her shaking hand across the tiny ball of light until it swirled with rainbow color. An intense concentration of illumination shot from the ball and spiraled toward the mine’s dank ceiling. Wang saw what looked like a city. Its buildings were almost grotesque in their grandeur, huge monoliths made of stone and steel that seemed to touch the orange-toned sky. The picture drew in closer and Wang saw a tangle of streets filled with hulking metal vehicles. The vehicles, bizarre in themselves to his ignorant eyes, were burned out and gutted. Several of them were filled with rotted skeletons but in one vehicle something putrid moved behind the glass, thrashed wildly seeking escape.
There were things shambling in the streets. These things walked on two legs but they were not human…not anymore. In various states of revolting decay they trod the streets, snarling, moaning…hunting. There were hundreds of the creatures, thousands of them as the picture changed and showed him images of another city, then another, thousands turned to millions as the cities burned so hot they singed the sky and turned the pale blue a festering…orange.
“No,” Wang whispered, nearly choking on the word as Reese drew her hand over the ball again and made it nothing more than the light it had once been. “This is not possible. Your pictures are lies.”
She watched him, frankly, honestly. She reached out and touched him, the feel of her flesh warm against the material of his shirt. She drew the shirt back at his arms to expose the dragon and the tiger burned into the skin of his arms. She drew his arms to her cheeks and pressed her tattooed flesh against his.
“Master, you know that they are not.”
“Turn away,” Wang said snatching his arms from her grasp. He watched as she did his bidding immediately. He began to take off his clothes, sliding into the rubbery black material in their place. When he had become the darkness, save for the pale moon that was his face, he said: “Tell me, Reese Wesley, what I must do.”
*
The two inky-black shadows followed the sound of the men deep within the mine. Reese had extinguished the light and both she and Wang used their senses to find the posse. The ten men had cornered their victim in a small branching tunnel. The man was staring at the killers in wide-eyed horror. In his hands he held a red stick of dynamite. Its end sizzled wicked gold in the torch lit darkness.
“Put the dynamite down, Turk,” Captain Danvers said reasonably. “We can take you in alive. Don’t matter much to me. The rewards the same either way.”
The Turk giggled insanely. “Where’s Vega?” he asked. “Vega looked into the hole. Butler was down there looking right back up at him. Vega took his lantern and ran away, left me in the dark. I heard a gunshot, over my own gunshots I mean, cause I tried to plug dead-Butler right between his white fuckin’ eyes—been usin’ these here sticks of dynamite for light. Maybe I killed some of them fuckers and maybe I didn’t. Vega’s dead. Dead as Butler. Right, am I right?”
“He’s shit-house nuts,” Roc-Dirty said in wonder. Thousands of dollars lay scattered around the lunatic. It floated in the thin wind that whispered though the mine. Caught on that wind, hundred dollar bills danced into the hole the Turk crouched over. There were also several burned out sticks of dynamite, their wicks scorched dangerously, insanely close to explosion.
“But the crazy man’s got the dynamite,” the Turk giggled. “Stupid bastard said there was gold down there. Gold. Somethin’s down there alright, but it sure ain’t gold. Listen, can’t you hear it? 45 infected, that’s what the voice keeps sayin’. 45 infected. Warning. Warning. Them fuckers ate ‘em. Ate ‘em like they was fried chicken and candied yams at Christmas. Most grisly fucking thing you ever saw in your life, I swear. But that ain’t the worst part. After they was all ate up, guts torn out and devoured and shit, the just got back up pretty as you please.”
The Turk laughed again. Beneath that laugh something moaned in vicious hunger capturing all his attention. He thrust his face down in the hole, lowering the dynamite so that he could see better in its darkness. “Lee Ray, you piece of shit!” he howled. “Shut the fuck up so that I can think! I gotta get ridda you! I gotta get ridda all of you. I gotta make sure your rotten asses never get out of this here fuckin’ hole. Especially you, you gray skinned bitch! Stop looking at me--!”
Captain Danvers shot him. The bullet entered his throat. The dynamite fell from his spasming hands as his body hit the stone wall behind the hole. Danvers whooped at the Turk died, the other man’s blood falling over into the hole like rainwater.
The explosion rocked the mine. The floor underneath the men buckled and fell inward. Screaming they slid into darkness. Wang and Reese went with them, leaping from falling rock to falling rock in order to lessen the impact of the fall.
“Kill them all!” Reese yelled as she rolled away from Wang in the darkness, “but if you can, Master, leave the source of the infection to me!”
Wang didn’t know what she was talking about and the cold, fetid breath on the back of his neck did not allow him to ponder it overmuch. The monster slammed into him and he could feel its teeth trying to get to the meat of his shoulder. Wang rolled forward, dancing to keep the monster from bearing him to the ground. His fingers felt frantically for its cold throat as it drew its head backward in an effort to try to bite him again. Another creature grabbed him in the claustrophobic blackness as the screams of the men around him reached a fevered crescendo of absolute horror.
“It’s got me! It’s got me! Captain! God, Captain!” someone screamed into the echoing darkness.
“My leg,” someone else whispered in panting panic, “it’s busted. What the fuck is going on? Danvers, what’s going on?”
Screams of pain mingled with howls of shocked disbelief. Wang struggled with his attackers, felt their teeth on him, trying to bite through the strange material that Reese had gifted him with. He pressed his fingers into the eyes of the moaning thing that was on him. The eyeballs burst underneath the pressure and for a moment his finger slid around in the greasy sockets. He jammed forward suddenly and speared the monster’s brain. As the monster’s teeth snapped at him ferociously, Wang dug deeper into the things brain, clawing and leaving devastation in his wake. Suddenly, the beast dropped, its body going completely limp.
Wang did not waste time with it, but turned on the other monster that was trying to savage him. It wrapped its cold arms around him from behind in a nightmare parody of a lover’s caress. He kicked backwards, grabbing its head at the same time. It was an old thing, moldering, skin came loose in his desperate hands as he used all of his strength to twist its neck all the way around. He heard the ripping of skin as its head came loose and its body skittered backward to lay still in the darkness.
“Infected…43…” a strange inhuman voice said in the darkness after Wang had make his kills. Then, there was more screaming. “Infected 45,” the voice began again rapidly. “Infected 46…Infected 47…Infected 48…”
Wang slid out of the way of a tangle of arms and claws that was making its way toward him. The moans of the dead were heavier than the screams of the living. Wang made himself a shadow and slowed his breathing. He closed his eyes again, becoming again the darkness that he hid within.
“Infected…49,” the inhuman voice sang.
A zombie lumbered past Wang and he reached out and grabbed it about the head. He twisted the head around until he heard the satisfying snap of its neck. The corpse fell, jittering, its limbs thrashing confused. Wang climbed on top of the thing and shoved his fingers into its eyes until it lay still and cold beneath him.
“Mother fuck!” Danvers voice rang out in the darkness. “Get off of me you…piece…of…shit!”
Orange light exploded into the blackness, illuminating the cavern for a second at a time. The white-dead writhed, bearing down on the screaming living in those moments of terrible light. As if following Danvers’s lead, as if remembering when he began to fire that they were armed, the cavern exploded in gunplay.
Wang slid up behind another zombie, wrapped it arms around its repugnant throat and slid his thumbs into its eyes. The thing thrashed in his grasp until Wang scrambled enough of the pink flesh inside its skull to cause it to fall limp at his feet.
He felt the heat of a bullet move past his head; simultaneously something low to the ground grabbed him and tried to sink its teeth into his thigh, worrying the material that barred it from the meat inside. Wang dropped down on the decomposing corpse. He was amazed at the ease with which he tore its body apart. When he pried its head free, he stepped on the hissing thing, grinding it to bone mush beneath the heel of his foot.
He became angry as grown men began to whimper and cry around him, angry at the abomination of a world that Reese had shown him. As a Shaolin Monk, Wang had a respect for life that was holy in its intensity. He did not eat meat. He did not kill unless there was no other choice. Life was precious and the things within the cavern existed to negate life completely, sought in their savage hunger to obliterate it…
The dragon and the tiger on his arm seemed to burn with the fury of his vengeance as he moved liquid fast amongst the monsters breaking necks in absolute silence, shattering eyeballs and seeking brains. Only once did he touch the shuddering form of a living man. The man gasped and shuttered with the sickness that was ravaging his half-devoured body. Wang shoved his fingers deep into this one’s eyes, touching the warm brain inside, listening to the hollowed horror of the man’s death screams.
This was the second life that Wang had taken. The pain in his heart was phenomenal. He felt the black stain, already on his soul, grow and fester. It was a mercy, he told himself as he moved into the shadows again to avoid the cold grasping hands of the dead.
“Infected…4,” the inhuman voice said as Wang rubbed his gore-spattered fingers across the front of the alien material that had saved his life.
“Master,” Reese’s whispered softly in the darkness. She grunted hard and something hit the ground heavily, “are you well?”
“Infected…3,” the inhuman voice sang.
The zombie was so pale that Wang could almost see it as it came at him. With snapping teeth it launched in his direction. Wang grabbed it and tackled it to the ground. Its fingers sought the exposed meat of his face as he snapped its neck. It was a fresh body and as he felt along it clothing, Wang felt the metals identifying it as military. Danvers, he thought, as he ripped into the thing’s cold eyeballs.
“Infected…2…Infected…1.”
The cavern was silent as death, save for the inhuman voice. “Infected…1,” it sang again and its voice was a warning that Wang took to heart.
He heard Reese cry out in the darkness and he moved in that direction, stumbling over the bodies of the slain. He grabbed the naked slimy human thing that held her. This thing was strong, its body reeking of the preservatives that had kept if from decay. When it opened its mouth to announce its hunger to the cavern, the sound was a roar that overwhelmed every other sound in the room.
The monster shoved Wang backward, so that he almost lost his footing and fell amongst the dead. The thing launched itself at him, snarling…demanding in its savage need.
Its teeth snapped inches from Wang’s nose, saliva rained on his face. The thing’s breath smelled like a rotten pickle jar and raw meat. Bile rose in Wang’s throat as he struggled for survival. He felt the added weight of Reese as she flung herself on top of the thing. She grunted as she fought with the monster. Wang drew up his feet, tucked his knees into his chest and shoved them both backward into the darkness.
Reese screamed and Wang jumped to his feet and followed the sound. The zombie was trying to turn her over, to get at the only exposed flesh on her, which was the flesh of her face. Wang leaned over the monster and thrusts his fingers into its eyes, tearing backward, feeling bone break off as the monster thrashed. He heard the wicked snap of his own fingers before he felt the blinding pain of the broken bones. He didn’t care. He just moved other fingers in the place of the broken ones, ripping the brain of the thing apart, shredding meat with his nails until the monster went still.
Wang drew in a shuddering breath as Reese climbed shakily to her feet. He pulled at his fingers, popping the bones back into place.
“Infection…neutralized,” the inhuman voice sang.
“His name was Cullen,” Reese said, softly, letting the strange white light low again so that Wang could see the tattoos of the dragon and the tiger that decorated his face. “He was one of us…contained within the canister so that we could study him. He was also my husband.”
“I’m sorry,” Wang whispered.
“Yeah, me too,” Reese said. She moved to the empty canister and set a tiny box with a winking red light within it. “Master, let us leave this place.”
Wang went with her and they stared up at the gulfing opening that would lead them out of the mineshaft. She produced a tiny object and aimed it at the opening. A rope spun from the thing with a hook at the end. The hook caught a heavy bit of rock and held on. Reese motioned for Wang and he grabbed hold of her as the thing lifted them out of the shaft.
When Reese began to run, Wang followed.
The barely passed the mouth of the mine before it exploded. It caved in on itself, as rock filled the empty spaces.
“Everything is as it should be and I must be going, Master,” Reese said, “but I have shown you horror, scarred you before your time. I want to show you something to make up for that. Something beautiful.”
The tiny ball in her hand began to glow again and Wang saw a pagoda, standing in the middle of an ornate square. Lotus trees blossomed all around it, their white leaves catching the light from the sun and the orange-tainted sky. At least a hundred people, dressed in white knelt before the pagoda, their heads bowed to the ground.
Wang saw himself, stepping out of the pagoda. He was older and his dark hair had turned gray. His body was still youthful and firm. He was dressed in white as well. Lotus petals danced in the wind as he surveyed those assembled before him.
“We will begin our lessons in survival now!” the Wang of the future said. “We will retake the world for the living!”
“All hail Bruce Lei Wang!” the assembled group said in unison. “All hail our Lord of the Lotus Petals!”
Reese smiled softly and pressed a kiss upon his lips. Then she stepped away from him, grasped the ball tightly in her hand and…disappeared.
Wang watched the place where the woman had stood for a long time, before he began to walk back in the direction of his campsite. The Lord of the Lotus Petals still need to find his brother, still needed to find a home. He looked back at the mine and shuddered, remembering the feel of dead flesh on his own.
There would be time enough for future things…in the future.
Chris has been fostered at the Crowley boot camp since he turned seven. At sixteen, he is finally ready to run away because his foster father is an abusive person who works Chris and the other children to the point of exhaustion. All he has left of h
The Lord of the Lotus Petals
